The War Z Was a 'Terrible Choice of Name,' Says Producer

Despite having a "terrible" name and being pulled from Steam for misleading buyers, Infestation: Survivor Stories (formerly called "The War Z") has sold 2.8 million copies.

In a postmortem on Gamasutra, Infestation's producer, Sergey Titov, explains the mistakes he and the development team made when launching their open-world zombie game, and the success that came in spite of them.

Exit Theatre Mode

"...The War Zwas a terrible choice of name, as it naturally invited comparisons between our game and DayZ. We made a big mistake in not listening to the vocal minority of our community who thought the name was terrible...

Beyond not listening to the community, we were also very arrogant in our public communications. We should have taken more care to communicate how and why this was not a DayZclone, citing specific differences in both design and conception. Instead of saying to ourselves 'Oh well, haters gonna hate!' we should have tried to understand where the hate was coming from and address it."

Titov adds that when he heard Dean Hall, leader of the DayZ team, was aiming to have his game on Steam by Christmas, he pushed to have The War Z on Steam sooner to win the "arms race."

"What we had basically done is taken a game that was still in beta (and advertised as such on our website) and made it available on Steam without a “beta” tag (which wasn’t even an option on Steam at that time). In addition to the misleading game description, this move meant that press were free to consider it a completed title and review it, leading to poor review scores. Interestingly, just eight or nine weeks later, Steam introduced the early access program; if we hadn’t been in such a rush and had waited for that, launching our beta on Steam could have been perceived much differently."